Wedding Photography Explained – Portrait Vs Landscape

Your wedding photographer or any other photographer for that matter will shoot in two modes portrait or landscape but what does that mean for your wedding photographs?

First of all I’ll teach some of you to suck eggs to make sure that there isn’t any confusion. A landscape photograph is wider than it is tall, whereas a portrait is taller that it is wide, more of a vertical image. That doesn’t mean that the bride and groom’s portrait picture should be vertical, a portrait can be shot in landscape mode too. In my opinion your portraits should mostly be shot in landscape anyway.

Look through my portfolio and you’ll see that most of my images are shot in landscape and because I think they look better. It’s my job to make your images look the best they can possibly be and more often than not that’s a landscape. One of the reasons for this is because of the way that humans see. Because our eyes are side by side our brain reads the world in landscape. Viewing a portrait image is unnatural – you’re required to move your head or eyes up and down to take in all the information in the photograph.

Again, with your best interests at heart another reason for shooting in landscape mode is because they fit better in an album. Vertical portrait images are difficult to arrange in an album so that they look pretty.

Overall landscape photography wins but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for portrait images. Some images are more dramatic in portrait mode. This doesn’t mean that I’ll just turn t camera to shoot vertically and hope it works, I’ll sometimes see something that looks like it would work as a portrait photograph, a scene with enough drama to justify this angle but as a photographer you must be careful to choose the right moment, the right image in the right setting otherwise too many photographs shot in portrait mode will make your wedding album look like a collection of snap shots.